


Passion's Brief Memory

by neevebrody



Category: Quiz Show (1994)
Genre: Angst, M/M, One Night Stands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-16
Updated: 2011-10-16
Packaged: 2017-10-24 17:10:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/265887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neevebrody/pseuds/neevebrody
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He presses his cheek to the sun-warmed glass and listens to the hum of life around him. Normal people going about their normal day in a way Charlie had never envied until now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Passion's Brief Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Rounds of Kink #12 (one night stand) - Prompt: They only had one night together before they parted ways – that hurt more than losing his teaching position.

Charlie cards through his hair with numb fingers and rests his head in his hands above the cold, half-empty coffee cup. He presses in against his temples – a hangover would be better. The lofty windows of the townhouse splay the morning sun across his back, warming him a little as he sits alone. Really alone. For the first time in how many months… utterly, blissfully alone. Solitude he can handle, embraces it actually, but that's very different from the emptiness. His stomach rumbles loudly, a reminder that part of him will always be empty.

The events of the past few days have cut the line between reality and his life before. Some of it remains hazy – the hearings, the aftermath. Clearer to him are the looks on his parents' faces at the news Columbia would seek his resignation. The damn reporters had even asked for their reactions. Christ, he would have walked through fire to have spared them that. Did walk through fire. Regrettably, Charlie thought, he hadn't been the only one consumed.

Pushing his cup away, he stands and walks to the window. He draws aside the flowing drapery and stares out at the city he'd held in his hand. While he's at a loss to say how he'd gotten from the Senate committee room outside and down those steps, he has no trouble recalling the last thing he saw before stepping into the taxi.

Dick had warned him, and maybe that had been the very reason Charlie had talked to the press anyway. He presses his cheek to the sun-warmed glass and listens to the hum of life around him. Normal people going about their normal day in a way Charlie had never envied until now. It _was_ the getting away with it he couldn't live with, wasn't it, or had there been something more in his defiance? Had he simply been unable to accept that evening at Columbia as the last time he'd ever see Dick Goodwin? Not that way. Not having lied to him.

Charlie's eyes drift shut, thinking there'd been nothing dishonest about their one night together. An innocent invitation – his regular Thursday night poker game. Looking back, alcohol might well have been to blame for the awkward groping, for the hands searching beneath clothes, finding belt buckles and zippers. For those half-aloud, strangled protests from Dick, made impotent by the way his hard cock fit so nicely in the curve of Charlie's hand. Still babbling excuses right up to the point where he'd surged into Charlie's fist and spilled over it, the words turned to harsh, panting breaths before finally giving in to Charlie's insistent lips, mouth hot and tongue searching as he'd slipped a hand inside Charlie's trousers.

Dick's grip: sure and confident, just the way Charlie had expected. He'd tried to hold out, to make it last, but after an evening of mentally circling one another like big cats in a cage, he'd gone off much too soon, aided by a few well-timed pulls and Dick's tongue in his mouth.

Yes, it seemed easy to lay blame at the feet of drink and lowered inhibitions, but what of the morning after. Darkness had held a tenuous dominion, though the wakening sounds of the city had already begun. Charlie had dared not to touch the man sleeping next to him, preferring an attempt to memorize the lines and curves, the sharp hint of cigar smoke, spiciness and old raincoats, and the unabashed cockiness that had drawn him to Dick from the start.

Charlie concentrates, tries to feel those warm arms around him again. That morning had been something just for Charlie, something he could forever call his own. Dick had pulled him close, his face an open page; one that Charlie had read instantly. He'd mapped the sturdy outlines of Dick's body and savored the earthy warmth and scents, committing them to memory. What had begun with gentle, tentative touches and nips led to long, slow licks, the arch of Dick's hips just the signal Charlie had waited for.

Accompanied by a moan and Dick's strong hands on his shoulders, Charlie had taken him into his mouth and worked him with the deliberation of an equation, had delighted in the fullness of his cock as one would the lines of a sonnet – the sweet but pungent taste an elixir swallowed up by Charlie along with the sound of his name. Called out not in protest, but with a breathless cadence that still skittered sparks the length of his spine.

Movements made in concert, against one another, finding the perfect symbiotic rhythm. Dick's eyes: dark, lustful, nearly colorless, had embodied the same longing from the night before – open, yet reserved – as if he'd known that moment was the only one left to them.

In a show of understanding, or just blind passion, Charlie had reached for them, to touch them, circling both cocks, bending to Dick's embrace, their mouths working into an unexpected kiss that opened fully the channel of desire between them. One feeding off the other until the pace of their bodies together, the heat, the grip of fingers on skin and tangled in hair seized Charlie with force enough to bend him backwards, straining against arms that seemed not to want to let him go.

At the sound of the short barks of breath beneath him, he'd forced himself to look. By god, if that was all he'd ever have, he was damn well going to take pleasure in every buck and gasp… every crease lining Dick's face… every shudder and surrender of his body.

Neither of them had spoken of it when they parted. Neither of them had needed to.

Out over the cityscape, he sees Dick's face… not through a haze, sated and comfortable, but at the top of those steps. Even at that distance, he'd known the look in those eyes. Dark and daring, with perhaps, Charlie hoped, a touch of sorrow. Not for him, for he deserved no one's pity, but for what might have been.


End file.
